Criminal liability applicable in the field of maintenance. What needs to be known

To be criminally liable is to be found guilty of an offence: you have committed a prohibited act, or failed to perform an obligatory act, and a text stipulates that, in this case, you are liable to a fine or imprisonment.

The maintenance manager is directly concerned by a large number of texts of this nature. They must ensure the safety of the people they supervise, to avoid being prosecuted for manslaughter or unintentional injury, but they must also ensure the safety of external employees, while not exercising hierarchical authority over the latter, on pain of committing the offence of bargaining.

From Charybdis to Scylla, the maintenance manager does not have the right to navigate at sight. The aim of this article is to provide some legal guidelines to help you assume your responsibilities and avoid criminal liability.

If a court finds him personally liable, the maintenance manager may be fined out of his own savings, as his company is not entitled to pay on his behalf, except as indicated in the following Article. He may also be sentenced to a prison term, which will almost always be suspended, since serious accidents on an industrial site are involuntary, even if they are very regrettable.

In practice, the maintenance manager is rarely subject to civil liability. More often than not, his company is jointly and severally liable with him to pay the damages to which the victim is entitled. On the other hand, his company alone may be ordered to pay damages to third parties in the event of damage caused to customers (quality defects in the company's products or services) or to local residents (nuisance to neighbors).